The same criticisms can be made in relation to Gladwell's book Outliers. Gladwell seeks to persuade through stories based on carefully selected anecdotes or research reports. He shows us what he wants to, in a way designed to entertain and engage us and to garner assent. He does not immerse us in the details of the case studies or the discussions in the social science literature to an extent that would enable us to form our own objective judgements. We are shown what Gladwell wants us to see, in the way he wants us to see it. Gladwell's work is classical persuasive rhetoric, not a well developed argument in social science.

The Centre for Mobilties Research (CeMoRe) studies and researches the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of 'mobilities'. The concept of 'mobilities' encompasses both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life.

John Meyer is a professor of sociology (and by courtesy, education) emeritus, at Stanford; a faculty member at CDDRL; and a senior fellow, by courtesy, at FSI. He received his PhD from Columbia University, and taught there for several years before coming to Stanford. His research has focused on the spread of modern institutions around the world, and their impact on national states and societies. He is particularly interested in the spread and impact of scientific activity, and in the expansion and standardization of educational models.

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a 'structureless' group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible, it may vary over time, it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities and intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals with different talents, predisposition's and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate 'structurelessness' and that is not the nature of a human group.

In sociology, social actions refer to any action that takes into account the actions and reactions of other individuals and is modified based on those events. Social action is a concept developed by Max Weber that explores interaction between humans in society. The concept of social action is used to observe how certain behaviors are modified in certain environments. The impact of social action is clearly seen in the development of norms and customs and everyday interaction between people.

i for one welcome our new physicist overlords (they have more computing power than us social scientists)

I first remember making this suggestion (somewhat in jest) to Andreas Zeller during a conversation at ISSTA 2000: my response to yet another outbreak of the "math vs. physics" debate was "we don't want to admit it, but we should really be debating whether we're more like sociologists or economists". He noted that he sees himself more as a 19th century 'naturalist" -- in particular, observational as well as experimental, a view that I tend to think of as compatible. A visit by across-disciplinary group from CMU to Microsoft Research sometime in 2002 was a key step towards making me believe that maybe I wasn't joking. Since then, discussions with many people helped refine these ideas and led me to conclude that they are ready toair; I would especially like to thank Jeannette Wing, Jeff Wallace, Mike Howard, Window Snyder, Pierre de Vries for the "consilient" viewpoint, Tony Hoare, Butler Lampson, Mary Shaw, Dan Gillmor, Cornell West

Judged by the amount of money directly dependent on it, the British Bankers’ Association’s London Interbank Offered Rate matters more than any other set of numbers in the world. Libor anchors contracts amounting to some $300 trillion, the equivalent of $45,000 for every human being on the planet. It’s a critical part of the infrastructure of financial markets but, like plumbing, doesn’t usually get noticed. Only a handful of economists, and no other academics, have ever looked in any detail at Libor, and even the financial press didn’t show much interest in how Libor is calculated until this spring, when there was sharp controversy over whether these crucial numbers could be trusted.

sociology at unc

Research Interests Adaptive behavior (how agents create and adapt to environment structures), decision making (simple heuristics that operate with bounded information and computation), search (how organisms explore and exploit different resources, including information), evolutionary psychology (mate choice, food choice)

via the syllabus finder

This on-line textbook introduces many of the basics of formal approaches to the analysis of social networks. The text relies heavily on the work of Freeman, Borgatti, and Everett (the authors of the UCINET software package). The materials here, and their organization, were also very strongly influenced by the text of Wasserman and Faust, and by a graduate seminar conducted by Professor Phillip Bonacich at UCLA. Many other users have also made very helpful comments and suggestions based on the first version. Errors and omissions, of course, are the responsibility of the authors.

n his obituary, Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger stated that Tilly "literally wrote the book on the contentious dynamics and the ethnographic foundations of political history".[1] Adam Ashforth, of Northwestern University, described Tilly as

Multiculturalists, on the other hand, exhibit a self-conscious desire to preserve cultures. Such ‘self-consciousness traditionalism’, as Brian Barry calls it, is a peculiarly modern, post-Enlightenment phenomenon. In the modern view, traditions are to

"Convoys Over the Life Course: Attachment, Roles, and Social Support."

All employees have a key for the coffee machine. Initially, I thought this was to prevent that students get free coffee, but it is intended to increase the social cohesion.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and obligations as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights;

This paper introduces the idea of Web 2.0 to a sociological audience as a key example of a process of cultural digitization that is moving faster than our ability to analyse it.

the impact of large-scale technology diffusion on individuals, families, and societies in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the developing world.

Research interests: Social, economic and technological change, particularly in mature industrial economies; historical social network analysis.

An amateur does something out of passion and happiness; a professional does something to put food on the table and deliberately seeks fame and power for pleasure. But pleasure is not necessarily happiness.

But we should worry about this psychology seeping too far into our lives. What if there were an application that could make it easier to pass on my love to a family-member? What if I no longer needed to read books in order to cite them, but could search t

CNET says: "Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he was director of the Collective Dynamics Group, and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, will lead Yahoo's research in human social dynamics, including soci

As Chip Ward, a Tomdispatch regular who just retired as the assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System, makes clear below, public libraries have become de facto daytime shelters for the nation's street people; while librarians are incr

A Benedictine sister and a sociologist, I am curious about the world, grounded in my faith, hopeful about all that might be, and sorrowful about much that is. Called in midlife to this monastery, I made my perpectual monastic profession in January 2006.

dean search candidate for umsi book

micro-contributions
of Lee Sproull et. al that is a useful concept and very CICish. You
can find her papers on the topic on the web.

Socionomics supports this research with the hypothesis that humans' unconscious impulses to herd lead to the emergence of social mood trends, which in turn shape the tone and character of social action. This perspective applies across all realms of social

Networked governance refers to a growing body of research on the interconnectedness of essentially sovereign units, which examines how those interconnections facilitate or inhibit the functioning of the overall system. The objective of this program is two

Social informatics is the critical social scientific study of information and communication technologies (ICTS), in particular the manner in which they mesh with existing social institutions and practices. SIRU is concerned with some of the big over-archi

Brian joined the Department in January 2006 as a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the new Social Informatics Research Unit (SIRU) in the Department. His academic interests are focused around the emergence of new information and communications technologi

As a web designer, one the most valuable things I learned when building sites was that watching people use prototypes or web sites was way more useful than asking them what features they wanted.

the analysis of delicious here isn't quite right - the objects in the system are not just URLs but also tags. flickr likewise has several axes of connectability.

sociologist working on social history of technology

more papers and presentations on social network analysis than you will find in any other place - looks fascinating

take ideas from one place and move them somewhere else